


The Gladstone Variations: His Father's Son

by 221b_hound



Series: The Gladstone Variations (AU of Guitar Man) [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU of an AU, Angst, Christmas, Explicit Sexual Content, Gladstone's Collar, Grief/Mourning, Guitar Man, John used to be in a band, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 21:26:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day after John has become a sperm donor for friends, he wonders if he has made the right choice. Given his own father's history of alcholism and violence, should John really be passing on his DNA? Isn't it tainted?</p><p>Sherlock finds he has a few observations to make on this point, even though he never met Jack Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gladstone Variations: His Father's Son

**Author's Note:**

> This story is the Variations take (in part) on the A Very Collared Xmas set of stories in the Guitar Man universe.

 

 

Sherlock returned from St Bart’s empty handed. He’d been able to replace the borrowed equipment without being spotted or questioned, but his secondary purpose – that of obtaining tissue samples from the lungs of a plumber from inner London and a plumber from Hampstead for comparison – had fallen through. Molly had been disappointed for him. She’d sort of meant it as a Christmas present, but the Hampstead plumber’s family had sent him for cremation before Molly had a chance to prepare a sample.

The sitting room at Baker Street was lit only by the string of lights wound around their small Christmas tree and a light left on in the kitchen. Archimedes, Sherlock noted, was swimming lazy circles around the aquarium-approved Christmas tree decoration that John had added to his tank last week. It should have been festive, which was irritating enough, but the gloom was even more annoying than tinsel.

Sherlock noticed John, hunched in his chair over a photo album, at once, but took the time to hang his coat on the hook, draping his scarf over it. Only then did he walk over to John, deducing what he could from the fact that John had not moved, had only murmured a quiet greeting as Sherlock came home.

“You’re having second thoughts,” said Sherlock.

“Not really,” said John, “And it’s a bit late now if I am.”

Sherlock grit his teeth on a reply, because John was right but Sherlock didn’t want to say so. If John had changed his mind, Sherlock wanted to find a way to undo last night, but the only options he could think of were out of the question. Well, if he wanted to stay out of jail, they were. Not that he wanted to do that to Mary and Nirupa, of course, but John…

“Stop thinking whatever it is you’re thinking,” said John, looking up at him with one eyebrow raised, “Whatever you’re thinking, we will not do that to Mary and Nirupa, and I’m all right. I haven’t changed my mind. I was just… thinking.”

A comment on how John really shouldn’t try to do that was also on the tip of his tongue, but Sherlock refrained. Nearly two years of being this man’s lover had finally taught him a thing or two about the right and wrong times to be a snarky bastard.

Instead, Sherlock crouched in front of John and placed a hand over the cover of the closed album. It was, he knew, an old family album. One of three that John had claimed as his only portion of his father’s estate.

Jack Watson had been a verbally, and occasionally physically, abusive drunk. He had hit John at least twice when John was still a teenager . John had a small scar under his hair from the second incident, when John was in Gladstone’s Collar. The old man had reacted badly to the lyrics of Empty House. This, Sherlock knew. Sherlock also knew about the Christmas incident, during his Year in Hell. He’d learned something of the details – of Jack’s stroke, John’s visit, the dreadful bender that had left John violently ill for three days. Sherlock had little time for Jack Watson, and felt only a passing relief for John’s sake when the old man had finally died a few months before.

And now here was John, sitting in the semi-darkness, brooding over the family photo album.

“You’re not like him, you know,” said Sherlock, correctly deducing the cause of John’s melancholy. Of course.

“I am,” said John, “A bit. We both have a temper.”

Sherlock frowned and shifted his hand from the photo album to cover John’s own hand

“You need not fear that you have bad blood, John. It’s a ridiculous concept in any case. You are not going to pass some kind of taint on to any child Mary may have conceived last night.”

John closed his eyes.

Last night.

Mary Morstan and Nirupa D’Souza had come to them eighteen months ago for help with strange threats on NIrupa’s life. They were lovely people: intelligent, vivacious, very much in love. Sherlock had been impressed particularly with Nirupa’s intellect. After solving the problem (a rival anthropologist, aware that D’Souza was close to uncovering the studies he had faked, trying to preserve his career. Once Sherlock had realised the significance of the clay pipe and the encrypted memory stick, he’d put the case away in a matter of hours) the four of them had remained good friends.  Sherlock took the opportunity to learn everything he could from Nirupa about London’s more recent immigrants from various African nations. John and Mary discovered a shared love of terrible action films.

Only a month ago, Mary and Nirupa had approached them, a little awkwardly, to ask if John would be a donor for them, so they could have a baby.

John, enamoured of Sherlock’s own son-by-donor, Sherrinford, had been flattered and touched and had said yes. Sherlock crushed down an unexpected jealous pang because the idea that some genetic expression of john might continue in the world after them had, in the end, appealed. And Mary was at least not an idiot. Tests proving the health of all parties had followed, followed by a very DIY first attempt.

Last night, Sherlock had sat behind John, hands wrapped around John’s middle, mouth kissing encouragement and approval into the back of John’s neck while John ejaculated into a cup. Sherlock had swept up the receptacle, handed it out the door to Nirupa, and went back to bed to kiss and snuggle and then get off with His John. Sherlock was aware that he was in some way reasserting his prior claim, and so did John, and that was fine. John seemed to want that too.

In the meantime, Nirupa took the sample upstairs to John’s old room where she and Mary employed the equipment Sherlock had liberated from the hospital, and cuddled and kissed and made love in their own expression of ownership of this process.

The women had left after breakfast, and everyone was hopeful that a successful conception had occurred. There were more things to try later, if not, including using a clinic, but Mary had wanted to try this first. Something more natural and loving.

And now John was thinking of his own painful youth, after the death of his mother in a car accident. He was thinking of his father’s drinking and his rages and, rather belatedly, wondering if his genes were fit to pass on to some unsuspecting child.

“How do you know?” John asked softly. It wasn’t rhetorical. He wanted, oh please, for Sherlock to tell him that he had not just done something monumentally cruel and stupid.

Before he spoke next, Sherlock thought long and hard about everything he knew and could deduce about a dead man he had never met, and about the man in front of him now.

“I know what I see, John,” said Sherlock after a while, “And what I infer from your history, the things you’ve told me about your parents.  I know you.”

John raised his head, brow furrowed, to look at Sherlock.

“I know, for example, that you are a lot like your mother. I can see from the photographs that you have her build. You have features in common. Notably your mouth and eyes. She is also the one who taught you to sing and play the guitar. Her gift with music, which she passed on to you, speaks of a freely expressive individual. Your sister Harry takes after your father much more closely, in both temperament and build. Neither of them communicated well, and both were prone to impatience and defensiveness. This similarity plays out in her alcoholism and her behaviour when she’s drunk as well. She’s an angry, mean drunk, just as your father was an angry, mean drunk.”

John’s jaw tightened. “He wasn’t always like that.”

“No. He wasn’t. I can see that in the early photographs, in the way he looks at your mother.” Sherlock paused to open the album on John’s lap. He flipped the pages until he found one of a long-gone Christmas. He waited until John had taken a good look, then flipped forward to a similar picture taken some years later of a birthday party. In each of them, Jack Watson gazed at his wife Fiona with tenderness and adoration. His was the face of a man deeply, abidingly in love with the woman he saw.

“You seem to be a lot like your father in one key area,” said Sherlock, his voice brisk and matter-of-fact, a counterpoint to the observations he was about to make, “You do not love easily, but when you love, you love wholly.”

John blinked.

“The difference is, I think,” continued Sherlock, “That you have a capacity for forgiveness that he lacked. You are able to empathise. Traits I imagine your mother possessed to a high degree.”

“She…” John swallowed, “She was very kind. Very compassionate. She taught me a lot about looking out for other people, as well as music. It’s who she was.”

“And it is who _you_ are,” said Sherlock firmly, “I can put myself in other people’s places and reason how they might think. You, however, can place yourself in their shoes and know how they might _feel_. And then you seem to have the ability to _forgive_ them. Like you forgave me for doing what I had to do to protect you.”

John turned his hand up so that his palm met Sherlock’s. He squeezed Sherlock’s hand.

“It makes you strong, John. It certainly makes you stronger than him. You don't break, because you understand.  Your father never forgave your mother for dying. He never forgave you for reminding him of her constantly. And he never forgave himself for feeling that way. Hence the rage.”

John let go a sigh; felt the tension leave his shoulders. It felt like it could be true: that his father had become that thing of storms and teeth because he’d been so shattered by his wife’s death, he didn’t know how to be anything but rage afterwards. His father had always been a gruff man, but John remembered earlier times that had been full of singing and laughter. His parents had loved each other. Deeply and abidingly.

John imagined for a moment who he could have been, had Sherlock really died that day, or on any of the terrible days between then and Sherlock’s return to Baker Street. Had John not found it in himself to hang on to the good things he’d gained from love rather than surrender to the fury and despair that the person he’d loved most in this world had been taken from him. _Again._

“You and he are alike in the depth of your feeling, but you are not him. Your empathy and capacity for forgiveness ensure it. Don’t fear that you will become him, or that any child of yours will be somehow tainted. You are your mother’s son, John, as well as your father’s, but much more hers. Don’t forget that any child will have Mary’s DNA as well, and she seems very sensible. Certainly less of an idiot than most.”

That made John laugh. He leaned forward and kissed Sherlock’s stern mouth.

“She’s smarter than me,” he said, grinning.

“That’s entirely possible,” assented Sherlock, “Although by no means certain.”

“Come here,” John pushed the photo album onto the floor and reached to bury his hands in Sherlock’s hair. He held Sherlock’s face and leaned forward to kiss him thoroughly, in the process sliding out of the chair. Sherlock put one arm up and around John, the other behind him to steady their progress down onto the carpet.

Once stably supine, Sherlock buried one hand in John’s sandy hair, holding him in place while they kissed. His other hand burrowed under John’s shirt and then under the waist of his jeans. The tips of his fingers wriggled against the cleft of John’s arse. John obligingly wriggled back, his legs sliding apart until he straddled Sherlock’s hips. He ground his pelvis in a delicious push against Sherlock’s and Sherlock arched up underneath him.

“You,” John kissed Sherlock’s throat, his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth again, “Are amazing. You are perfect. You are...” he lost his train of thought as his mouth moved down and his fingers began to undo buttons.

“Say it,” whispered Sherlock, reaching for John’s belt buckle.

John moaned as Sherlock’s hands dipped down, cupped his erection, then as warm fingers slid inside his pants and rubbed over the crown of his swollen, slick, so hard cock.

“Say it,” Sherlock repeated, his other hand sliding up under John’s shirt so he could rub his thumbs over John’s hardening nipples.

“Sweetheart,” said John, “God yes. My baby. My Crumpet,” John murmured against Sherlock’s mouth.

“Mmmmm,” Sherlock approved.

Clothing was stripped and thrown aside. Shirts and trousers over chairs and under sofas. Underpants ended up hanging among the baubles on lower branches of the tree and flung over the skull. Archimedes swam in circles, ignoring everything happening under the Christmas tree.

John’s hips rocked against Sherlock’s, their bodies slicked with saliva and perspiration and pre-ejaculate. Sherlock held John by the thighs and pushed up against him. John’s nails raked gently over Sherlock’s chest. He leaned over, sucked on Sherlock’s lower lip, bit his throat carefully, nipped his earlobe.

“Say it,” he said, “Please baby.”

“M-my h-h-honey. Honey. Honnnn-eeeey.”

“God you’re gorgeous. Wonderful.” John pressed his cock firmly down, along, sliding his shaft against Sherlock’s. Sherlock reached between them, his large, graceful hand encircling them both. “Christ, yes, Sherlock. That’s… yes. Yes, baby. God, my b-b-b-beautiful. Yes.”

Bodies tense and exquisite, backs arching, breath catching, they came, moments apart. John folded, panting, on top of Sherlock’s chest. Sherlock wrapped an arm around John’s back and kissed the top of his head.

“You love me,” said Sherlock.

“Christ, yes, I do.”

“I love you, too,” said Sherlock.

“I know.”

“Good. Don’t worry about the child,” said Sherlock, “There’s nothing wrong with your genes. You are no… bad seed.”

A pause. “Sherlock. Did you just make a semen pun?”

Another pause. “No.”

“Liar.” John laughed and kissed Sherlock’s chest.

Sherlock wrapped his long arms around John and held him close. John nuzzled into his throat.

“I’m glad,” said John indistinctly into the hot, pale skin under his mouth.

“About?” Sherlock had three theories as to the answer, but he felt too sated and lazy to deduce them further.

“That I’m like him, in just that thing. That he loved her that much, even though it broke him. That I love you that much, but it didn’t break me. Nearly, but it didn’t.”

“You’re more resilient than you know. You’ll be a good father, both genetically and environmentally. Trust me on this, John. I’m a detective. I know these things.”

John laughed against Sherlock’s chin, but sounded sincere when he said: “Thank you. And thank you for coming back to me.”

Sherlock eschewed words in favour of kissing John’s face, showers of little kisses on his brow and cheeks, on his hair, his eyebrows, his ears. John giggle and kissed him back, until their mouths met and little kisses became long, slow ones. Leisurely and breathless and fond and charged with their alchemic electricity.

Christmas kisses, promises for a future neither had ever believed could exist, but was theirs, now.

 


End file.
